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What do you do for a living?
I’m not talking about your job title or
your daily tasks, I am talking about what
you actually do, what you actually create,
what you improve, what you contribute…
For some of you watching this question might
be pretty easy to answer, but for those of
you who find yourself working as a middle
manager, overseeing a human resources team
at an insurance underwriting company, well…
it might be a little harder.
In the last century service jobs have gone
from representing less than a quarter of all
jobs to now representing nearly 80% of workers.
Now when we think of service jobs we think
of people serving us coffee, finding a pair
of pants from out the back, or carrying bags
to our hotel room.
Sure they might be an unnecessary luxury for
the people using these services but it’s
still pretty easy to see that they do produce
value, be it in the form of a nice cup of
coffee, a flash new outfit, or promptly delivered
luggage (without the need for a physio appointment
the next day)
But you see the thing is the service sector
is far more broad than the name implies it
encompasses everybody from call centre salespeople
to CEO’s.
In fact it is quiet difficult these days to
find a job outside of the service sector specifically
because those roles require special certifications,
remember that for later because it is important.
But the growth of the self-serving service
sector, and the subsequent rise in bull jobs
that came with it seems a bit odd.
Surely the efficient free market would weed
out these individuals that are contributing
nothing, punishing the companies that bear
their salary expenses while rewarding the
more efficient organisations that do without
them…
right?
Well no,
And to understand why it’s time to learn
“how money works” in the modern day to
perpetuate the existence of people who work
to nothing but justify their own existence.
And to start off with this quirk of modern
advanced capitalism we need to first look
at soviet communism.
The Soviet Union was built on the idea of
noble labour.
The state said that work was honourable and
dignified!
The word “soviet” loosely translates to
a workers council, and people took pride in
their labour above all else.
This caused problems when there wasn’t enough
work to go around amongst everybody.
The drive for full employment meant some people
were given tasks that we obviously totally
redundant.
Factory managers hired as many people as they
possibly could because it was honourable to
oversee the labour of so many of your comrades.
They also feared that if they didn’t give
people jobs now, they wouldn’t be able to
get the people they did need in the future.
This “worker hoarding” as it became known
meant that some people were given jobs like
counting endless inventories of nuts and bolts.
Now obviously there are huge differences between
the modern western world and 1950’s Russia,
but there are also some concerning similarities.
The theory of totally unnecessary jobs really
started to gain traction after the anthropologist
David Graeber published the book Bull Jobs
in which he outlined 5 broad categories of
jobs that had become more and more common.
The first are what he called the flunkies,
think people like doormen, receptionists,
chauffeurs, and assistants.
These people exist to make other people feel
better about themselves and could all easily
be replaced with some kind of technology,
that’s if they are really needed at all.
Then there are the duct tapers, these are
people who work to alleviate problems that
could very easily be fixed permanently.
Think of someone like an inventory manager
that just so happens to have the system permissions
to update stock levels in a warehouse, where
that could be done automatically or at the
very least shared amongst floor staff.
In his Book, Graeber talks of a duct taper
whose entire job was fixing the mistakes made
by an apparently brilliant statistician.
In reality this star employee was actually
hopeless and the duct taper had to fight with
bureaucracy to get his mistakes fixed before
they could do any damage.
This example shows that the solution to the
problem is not always getting rid of the person
in the bull job, because the duct taper themselves
was probably contributing some value but would
be able to create value much more effectively
had a needless obstacle been removed.
The same can not be said for the next bull
category on the bull jobs list, and that is
the box tickers.
The army of mindless drones that exist in
big companies around the world, because they
make said companies appear legitimate to other
big companies.
Think of the people that create internal company
newspapers with stories about key executives
or… whatever it is that is that’s reported
in those things…
I mean… nobody actually reads them, and
that’s the point.
But if a company didn’t have an internal
newspaper, or a party planning committee,
or a culture co-ordinator then it might look
like a small fry company not worth doing business
with or working for.
Now it’s time to get into the real demons
of the bull job world.
The GOONS…
Goons are the affectionate name given to a
class of job that actually has a negative
impact on society, but make themselves necessary
by simply existing.
The classic example of this is in house corporate
lawyers.
They don’t really produce anything but if
you don’t have them then it will end up
costing you a lot more to hire external council
to fight off lawsuits from companies that
DO have internal corporate lawyers.
Perhaps the best example of this are patent
trolls, which are basically companies that
will buy up other companies with lot’s of
generic patents and then try to sue other
companies in the hope that they will just
agree to settle out of court.
Even the largest companies in the world are
guilty of perpetuating this negative sum game…
Apple famously sued Samsung for a patent over
a rectangular phone with rounded corners.
Now just ask yourself, despite what you make
think about patents and intellectual property,
what value was being created by the thousands
of people who’s full time job it was to
enforce that ruling?
Beyond just the lawyers there are people like
lobbyists who fight to simply changes the
rules of the game around and salespeople who
exist purely to move business dealings from
one company to another while being the definition
of a middleman in the process.
Now you might think the goons are bad, but
they have nothing on the worst of the worst
amongst this bunch of pointless workers…
The Task Masters!!
These are the people assigned to watch over
and manage people that really don’t need
to be watched over or managed.
Effective management does exists, especially
when it is co-ordinating a team with a wide
set of skills, but someone like a sales manager
who lords over a team of people with exactly
the same job title is a little bit different.
At BEST they are going to be an overpaid cheerleader
encouraging people to work harder in roles
that may themselves be bull.
At worst they will be distractions desperate
to justify their existence by calling meetings
and creating “strategic mission statements”
that achieve nothing but pulling people away
from a job where they do actually have a chance
of doing something meaningful.
These roles are not singular prescriptions,
in fact some particularly useless employees
may find that their role is a combination
of all five of these factors.
Many middle managers exist to oversee fundamentally
useless departments, and only have a job because
a highly layered corporate hierarchy makes
the big wigs at the top of the food chain
feel good about themselves.
But this doesn’t answer the question…
how did we get here?
The soviet union created bull jobs because
it was obsessed with having a job for everybody,
and the nation took pride in labor.
But our capitalist systems are supposed to
be better than that right?
Well sort of… but we are still victims of
the same beurocracy.
Sure, companies would do well for themselves
by cutting down on these tasks, but sometimes
these incentives can be misaligned with the
actual decision makers.
In the same way a soviet factory worker might
horde staff to make themselves seem important,
modern middle managers will do the same.
In the same way factory walls were covered
in propaganda about the brilliance of soviet
laborers, LinkedIn pages are covered in self
serving propaganda about how much of an honour
it was for some analyst to spearhead the joint
development project for streamlining customer
satisfaction in the bull corporation multi-platform
digital sales ecosystem.
In the same way that the Soviet Union was
obsessed with everybody having work to do,
even if it meant making up meaningless jobs,
modern workplaces are obsessed with everybody
working their full 40 hour weeks… even if
it means… well… making up meaningless
tasks.
This is before we consider the bureaucracy.
Let’s get one thing out of the way, countries
like the USA are not home to totally free
markets, there are laws and regulations about
how to do… pretty much everything.
Want to build a factory?
Well you better make sure it’s in a location
zoned for heavy industry, and you better do
an appropriate tender for the contract to
construct that factory and have appropriate
insurance and if you are shipping your products
overseas you need to make sure you pay the
appropriate tariffs and excises.
All of these steps involves other large institutions
which will themselves harbor bull jobs.
Now this isn’t to argue for big government
or small government, some policies really
are important, and of course some are bull,
but companies have had a very important part
to play in this whole system as well.
The growth in lobbying has led to the creation
of more and more legislation which has made
it such that starting and maintaining a successful
business of any size is almost impossible
without a team of accountants and lawyers
who will help a business owner navigate this
bureaucracy.
You might say this is in the best interest
of large corporations because it makes it
harder for potential competitors to get off
the ground but we don’t want to point finger
here.
Anyway is there a solution to this?
As a society?
Sure, embrace the idea that it’s ok to not
work 40 hours a week.
The idea that a job is either bull or not
bull is not entirely correct, in reality almost
all jobs will have some level of bull built
into daily duties.
If it was acceptable to say my work is done
I’m done for the day, then it would be a
lot easier to see who is contributing nothing.
As an individual?
Ahh not really, the truth is if you do find
yourself in a role with a lot of bull tasks,
you might just have to suck it up in the short
term, maybe work on a side hustle free from
bull in your off time.
Or you know embrace it, there are lot’s
of people that are very proud of their superfluous
yet important sounding titles, maybe it makes
the pointless meetings, or the irrelevant
PowerPoints easier to get through now that
you know it’s all bull.
Of course if you actually do want to truly
immerse yourself in… umm well… bureaucracy
and you decide that one accounting job isn’t
good enough for you, then go and watch our
video’s on eve online to find out how a
video game has cultivated a financial system
so complex it harbors it’s very own bull
jobs.
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how money works.
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